Whatever is it that we are all looking for? I fancy that it is really
quite close. When I was a boy I had a fancy that Heaven or Fairyland or
whatever I called it, was immediately behind my own back, and that this
was why I could never manage to see it, however often I twisted and
turned to take it by surprise. I had a notion of a man perpetually
spinning round on one foot like a teetotum in the effort to find that
world behind his back which continually fled from him. Perhaps this is
why the world goes round. Perhaps the world is always trying to look
over its shoulder and catch up the world which always escapes it, yet
without which it cannot be itself.
In any case, as I have said, I think that we must always conceive of
that which is the goal of all our endeavours as something which is in
some strange way near. Science boasts of the distance of its stars;
of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak.
But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost
menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always
the Kingdom of Heaven is “At Hand”; and Looking-glass Land is only
through the looking-glass. So I for one should never be astonished if
the next twist of a street led me to the heart of that maze in which all
the mystics are lost. I should not be at all surprised if I turned one
corner in Fleet Street and saw a yet queerer-looking lamp; I should not
be surprised if I turned a third corner and found myself in Elfland.
I should not be surprised at this; but I was surprised the other day at
something more surprising. I took a turn out of Fleet Street and found
myself in England.
.....
The singular shock experienced perhaps requires explanation. In the
darkest or the most inadequate moments of England there is one thing
that should always be remembered about the very nature of our country.
It may be shortly stated by saying that England is not such a fool as
it looks. The types of England, the externals of England, always
misrepresent the country. England is an oligarchical country, and it
prefers that its oligarchy should be inferior to itself.
The speaking in the House of Commons, for instance, is not only worse
than the speaking was, it is worse than the speaking is, in all or
almost all other places in small debating clubs or casual dinners. Our
countrymen probably prefer this solemn futility in the higher places of
the national life. It may be a strange sight to see the blind leading
the blind; but England provides a stranger. England shows us the blind
leading the people who can see. And this again is an under-statement
of the case. For the English political aristocrats not only speak worse
than many other people; they speak worse than themselves. The ignorance
of statesmen is like the ignorance of judges, an artificial and affected
thing. If you have the good fortune really to talk with a statesman, you
will be constantly startled with his saying quite intelligent things. It
makes one nervous at first. And I have never been sufficiently intimate
with such a man to ask him why it was a rule of his life in Parliament
to appear sillier than he was.
It is the same with the voters. The average man votes below himself; he
votes with half a mind or with a hundredth part of one. A man ought to
vote with the whole of himself as he worships or gets married. A man
ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for
faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his
hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of
it should creep into his vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs, they
should be in his ears when he makes the mystical cross. But as it is,
the difficulty with English democracy at all elections is that it is
something less than itself. The question is not so much whether only a
minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of
the voter votes.
.....
This is the tragedy of England; you cannot judge it by its foremost men.
Its types do not typify. And on the occasion of which I speak I found
this to be so especially of that old intelligent middle class which I
had imagined had almost vanished from the world. It seemed to me that
all the main representatives of the middle class had gone off in one
direction or in the other; they had either set out in pursuit of the
Smart Set or they had set out in pursuit of the Simple Life. I cannot
say which I dislike more myself; the people in question are welcome to
have either of them, or, as is more likely, to have both, in hideous
alternations of disease and cure. But all the prominent men who plainly
represent the middle class have adopted either the single eye-glass of
Mr. Chamberlain or the single eye of Mr. Bernard Shaw.
The old class that I mean has no representative. Its food was plentiful;
but it had no show. Its food was plain; but it had no fads. It was
serious about politics; and when it spoke in public it committed the
solecism of trying to speak well. I thought that this old earnest
political England had practically disappeared. And as I say, I took one
turn out of Fleet Street and I found a room full of it.
.....
At the top of the room was a chair in which Johnson had sat. The
club was a club in which Wilkes had spoken, in a time when even the
ne’er-do-weel was virile. But all these things by themselves might be
merely archaism. The extraordinary thing was that this hall had all the
hubbub, the sincerity, the anger, the oratory of the eighteenth century.
The members of this club were of all shades of opinion, yet there was
not one speech which gave me that jar of unreality which I often have in
listening to the ablest men uttering my own opinion. The Toryism of this
club was like the Toryism of Johnson, a Toryism that could use humour
and appealed to humanity. The democracy of this club was like the
democracy of Wilkes, a democracy that can speak epigrams and fight
duels; a democracy that can face things out and endure slander; the
democracy of Wilkes, or, rather, the democracy of Fox.
One thing especially filled my soul with the soul of my fathers. Each
man speaking, whether he spoke well or ill, spoke as well as he could
from sheer fury against the other man. This is the greatest of our
modern descents, that nowadays a man does not become more rhetorical
as he becomes more sincere. An eighteenth-century speaker, when he got
really and honestly furious, looked for big words with which to crush
his adversary. The new speaker looks for small words to crush him with.
He looks for little facts and little sneers. In a modern speech the
rhetoric is put into the merely formal part, the opening to which nobody
listens. But when Mr. Chamberlain, or a Moderate, or one of the harder
kind of Socialists, becomes really sincere, he becomes Cockney. “The
destiny of the Empire,” or “The destiny of humanity,” do well enough
for mere ornamental preliminaries, but when the man becomes angry and
honest, then it is a snarl, “Where do we come in?” or “It’s your money
they want.”
The men in this eighteenth-century club were entirely different; they
were quite eighteenth century. Each one rose to his feet quivering with
passion, and tried to destroy his opponent, not with sniggering, but
actually with eloquence. I was arguing with them about Home Rule; at
the end I told them why the English aristocracy really disliked an Irish
Parliament; because it would be like their club.
.....
I came out again into Fleet Street at night, and by a dim lamp I saw
pasted up some tawdry nonsense about Wastrels and how London was rising
against something that London had hardly heard of. Then I suddenly
saw, as in one obvious picture, that the modern world is an immense and
tumultuous ocean, full of monstrous and living things. And I saw that
across the top of it is spread a thin, a very thin, sheet of ice, of
wicked wealth and of lying journalism.
And as I stood there in the darkness I could almost fancy that I heard
it crack.